


leopard on a string

by sinead



Series: popslash bits 'n things [2]
Category: NSYNC, Popslash
Genre: M/M, Porn, Tour Fic, timbertrick - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-18
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-27 13:22:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6286327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinead/pseuds/sinead
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chris and Justin and how they grew.</p>
            </blockquote>





	leopard on a string

  


They are backstage, at some venue, someplace--Tulsa, maybe? Amarillo? Someplace like that, and it doesn't matter and Chris won't even remember the name of the town later, but he'll remember the extra empty dressing room, he'll remember how he steers Justin into it and strips him of his silvery mesh shirt the second the door closes. How he kisses Justin, fisting a hand in his sweat dampened curls, biting his chest through the skimpy black undershirt, pulling the shoulder strap down and sucking on a stiff nipple. At the touch of Chris' mouth on his naked skin, Justin gasps and wrenches the undershirt further down, stretching it, and Chris looks up through his eyelashes to see Justin tip his head back against the wall, his mouth half open. Chris tugs impatiently on the baggy pants, pulling them down around Justin's knees, and then nudges his finger between Justin's thighs, moaning a little as they part for him. He dives into the swampy heat beneath Justin's balls, ghosting the tip of his finger across them, teasing Justin's ass, moving his finger forward to trace the outline of his cock through his underwear, moving it back again. He can smell the hot salty scent of sweat, his own, and Justin's. He points his tongue until it's almost like a hard little finger itself to flick against Justin's other nipple. Justin is shuddering and making soft mewling sounds, hunching over him now, carding his hair with long fingers, kneading his shoulders like a kitten going for milk. Chris presses up gently, feeling for that tender space behind the scrotum, hot and heavy against his wrist, and feels like he is balancing Justin's shaking body on his fingertip. In a moment they will hear Lonnie's shout and they will need to get on the bus and ride back to the hotel and there they'll be able to strip off the rest of their clothes and fall into bed undisturbed, but right now, that moment seems an eternity away.

*************************************

It had started with pictures. God knows, they all looked at enough of them, constantly. They had more pictures of the past five years than any sane person would want. Pictures of all of them. Together, alone. With braces, with pimples, with braids, with blond hair, with maroon hair, with a lot of bad outfits and a few good ones. Smiling, scowling, sitting, standing, jumping, dancing, singing. No outrageously doting parent could have documented these years more scrupulously.

When looking at Justin recently, Chris often had the feeling that he, Chris, was mentally shuffling through a stack of photographs, pictures whose time period was melting and shifting beneath his gaze. Here was one of Justin in a baby blue tracksuit, his skinny boy's neck weighted by that bling bling around it, his feet awkward and outsized in the Adidas knockoffs that Lou had had them wearing that month. Oh, oops, no--that was a current version of the baby blue track suit, and the shoes were now the genuine article, and Justin's well adorned throat was actually a muscular column above the heavy width of his shoulders. Here was another, showing Justin's bee-stung, pouty, perfect mouth, which never seemed to change, but were there traces of a beard on his jaw line now? And here, in this picture, he spread his arms, kneeling on a bed, looking boyishly vulnerable, but the span of those arms grew bigger, lengthening as Chris looked.

Chris shook himself mentally and took a swallow of beer. His vision focused sharply on the present moment and on Justin, arms spread like wings on the dance floor. Three girls gyrated within his demarcated territory, one on either side of him, one in front. His eyes were closed. He raised his outspread arms above his head, and the girls moved closer to him, as if pulled on wires.

Chris, buzzed on beer and the joint he and Joey had shared in the limo, felt his mind's eye fire off like an Arriflex. click. The slanting shafts of blue club spotlights sparking off curls and the diamonds in his ears. click. The sleek gleam of his chest above the curved neckline of his white tank. click. The folds of his jeans where his long thigh met his hip, as he sank and rocked, sinuous.

Chris felt these pictures burn into him in hot white flashes. Fucking MTV had taken over his brain, beaming their goddamn production aesthetic right into his cerebral cortex. His head swam, and he turned to Lance, who was sitting next to him at the table, looking comfortingly tangible. He was also watching Justin dance, with a little half smile on his face. Chris wanted nothing more in that moment than to once again have the single vision that would let him smile while watching Justin dance in a nightclub with three girls, and not see the whole youthful procession of past Justins fading in and out behind him. He tried to make a joke.

"Our baby's growing up," he said. He was aiming for sardonic, but missed.

"I'm so proud," Lance replied drily. That was a good thing about Lance. Comments like Chris' didn't throw him; he simply responded in kind, unlike JC, who would look worried, and ask you if you were alright. Chris looked back at the dance floor. Justin was now watching him through half opened eyes, the girls still swirling around him.

"He--" Chris stopped. Lance waited silently.

"Never mind," Chris muttered, and Lance didn't press it. That was another good thing about Lance.

***************************

The day after the club outing, they had a photo shoot that Chris quickly dubbed "In Honor of Dead Cows." He told this to Joey while they listened to the photographer talk about his concept for the pictures. The photographer was named Winz. ("It's pronounced VAHN-ZUH", he had declared loudly. "I'd rather just call him Winny," Joey muttered. "Think he'll mind?") Winz was dressed from head to toe in various types of animal skins, from his ostrich skin boots up to his leather vest trimmed with the strips of gazelle hide. Winz insisted on taking individual shots of all of them sitting in a leather chair, wearing leather pants. Barefoot. Chris sat beneath the hot lights, cursing leather pants, and hoping he didn't look like a dork. Winz had instructed him to sit crossed-legged in the chair, and was debating how he should hold his arms.

"We wish you to look puck-eeesh," he said. Beyond the brilliant circumference of the lights, Chris could make out Joey and Lance, with looks of terrible glee on their faces. Justin and JC were still in make-up. Suddenly, Joey's baritone floated over, supported by Lance's lowing bass.

"Moooooo. Mooooo."

Winz snapped to attention with a look of pained outrage that did not bode well, Chris thought, for Lance and Joey. In the end, all those not actually being photographed were banished to the no-man's land of the catering table, which was behind a wall. He couldn't decide whether he was glad or disappointed that he never really got a good look at Justin in his leather pants.

****************************

A week or so later, Johnny had dropped a thick envelope on the table after they finished lunch at the WEG compound.

"Proofs," he said.

"It's the Dead Cow shoot, isn't it?" asked Lance with some trepidation. Joey tore open the envelope.

"Hey," he said, "not as bad as it could have been." He began passing around the proof sheets.

Lance groaned.

"That bastard," he said. "I knew he was out to get me with that jacket." He glanced at Joey's proof sheets. "How come I'm the only one who suffered?"

"I told him the mooing was your idea," Joey said abstractedly. "Ow! Fuck, Bass!" Lance had punched his arm.

Chris inspected the proofs. It was true, the jacket Lance was wearing sort of overwhelmed him in the pictures, as if he were wrapped in some kind of psychedelic Holstein hide. Which was too bad, because otherwise, he looked good. JC, Joey, even his own pictures had come out better than he expected. Then they flipped the next sheets over, and he saw Justin.

In Justin's pictures, he lay languidly back in the chair's embrace with his feet up on the seat, pulled in close to his body, and one knee cocked lazily in the air. Something about the pose of his hands, the way the light fell around him, made it seem as it he was offering up his leather clad crotch like a heap of exotic fruit, his eyes slightly heavy lidded and sleepy. Looking at the pictures, Chris realized he felt a lot of conflicting things, not the least of which was a strong desire to find Winz, and kick his ass.

There was a moment's silence as they all stared at the page proofs of Justin's shots, broken by Lance's wolf whistle, long and low.

"Jeee-zus," JC muttered. It was a mark of how startled he was, Chris realized vaguely. JC, who used four letter words with the best of them, had been stringently trained from birth in the practice of Not Taking The Lord's Name In Vain.

Joey gave a little snort of laughter and said, "J, man, you've got to warn us before you pull shit like that, so we can have the cold showers standing by." At that, they all laughed, and Justin good-naturedly elbowed Lance, who was singing "hey, big spendaaah..." under his breath.

 

Finally, there had been a night when Justin pinned him in that gaze onstage and rolled his hips as slowly and deliberately as though he were scooping ice cream with his pelvis. That night Chris had hung back and grabbed his wrist as they came offstage and pushed him against an empty equipment case. He held Justin down and kissed him, wet, breathless kisses, while Justin made little sounds into his mouth. Then he was sort of unnerved by his own behavior and pulled back until he felt Justin's legs come up and wrap around his waist. He could feel the pressure of Justin's erection against his stomach, and kissed him again, more slowly, breathing "yeah?" into his mouth.

"Don't stop," Justin murmured, and so Chris didn't, sliding down and sucking him off, and then coming over the damp skin of Justin's belly with five quick hard strokes of his hand, while Justin watched and groaned, "yeah. yeah." It was a miracle that no one caught them, really.

They were on the bus five minutes later, heading back to the hotel. Once there, Chris took a shower and turned out the lights and climbed into bed, and all he could think of was a time in Stuttgart, when Justin had cried because he was tired of touring and missed home. He was deep into self-recrimination when there was a knock on the door.

"hey," Justin said, standing there in the light of hall, wearing a faded t-shirt and looking cool and self-possessed and over the age of consent, not at all like the trembly lipped boy of Chris' imaginings. "Are you freaking out? or can I come in?" He did, and proceeded to pretty much torch every guilt-ridden thought to ash by giving Chris a blowjob that laid to rest the idea that he'd never done anything like this before. He did it again the next night, and the next, and in between, Chris licked every part of him. Chris got used to kissing Justin, to having Justin curl around him while he slept, to having access to his naked body. He didn't ask where Justin had acquired his carnal experience. At first, he thought that was because it hadn't seemed important, but as time went on, he realized it was because he didn't want to know.

The first time Chris fluttered his fingers across Justin's ass, he noted the wanton jerk of Justin's hips and the sudden rigidity of his cock, pressing into Chris' stomach. After that, when they went back to the hotel following a show, Chris would sometimes put him in a steaming bathtub, where he would tenderly sponge his back and the long muscles of his flanks, wash his fingers and toes. Then he would bend him over the edge of the hotel bed and rim him until he moaned and then flip him over and fuck him until he screamed. Justin liked it hard. Nights when the headboard thumped and the sheets ended up in a twisted mass on the floor were the nights that had him sweating and shuddering, lifting his ankles to lock them behind Chris' neck. The next morning would find them sleeping as though stunned, sleeping through the wake-up call, until someone had to come and bang on the door. They would stumble into breakfast, Justin wearing a bandana to cover his terminal case of bedhead. Mornings like those, Chris felt as if the two of them were enclosed in a bubble, and any sensations beyond the sound of Justin's breathing in the elevator, the feel of his back muscles beneath his t-shirt as Chris touched him, or the sight of his face on the pillow, were all muted and distant.

It was on one of these mornings that Lance leaned over the table and deliberately laid a finger against Justin's neck. Justin, sleepily eating cereal, did not react, but Chris, who would have thought he was too fucked out to move so fast, suddenly found himself standing by Justin's chair with a hand on Lance's wrist, before he realized what he was doing and dropped it. He shifted his gaze to Justin's neck, where Lance had touched it, and saw the purplish love bite there.

"Be careful," Lance said simply. They were in a private dining room, and he turned his eyes to the door to the lobby, perhaps indicating the hordes of fans and photographers that were waiting outside. Then he looked at Chris, Lance's direct, friendly gaze that he used to tell you things you didn't want to hear, and maybe he meant to warn Chris of something more than just the many headed beast outside the door.

"'Sup, dude," Justin muttered muzzily, and Chris sat down again and put his hand on Justin's thigh, under the table.

"Nothing," he said.

  
  


The bed in the hotel room in Tulsa or Amarillo had a lattice design in the headboard that left openings the perfect size and height for Justin's clutching hands. Chris found himself mesmerized by the way the knuckles whitened in time with his thrusts. He ran his hand down Justin's spine, and then back up to touch the base of his own cock. Justin shifted, pulling his knees apart, spreading himself further open. He turned his face in the pillow and gasped. Chris felt his hips speed up, independent of his own control, pulled by the heavy rhythm of Justin's moans.

  
  


Chris stood in the door of the bathroom. The bedside lamp was out, and Justin lay almost asleep in the swath of light from the bathroom door. Chris looked at him and remembered a fable in a book his mother used to read to him, about a lonely man who had asked the gods for a companion and had been given a leopard and a string to leash him with. "But how can I live safely with this creature at my side," he had asked. "Convince him that he is a man," had been the divine response. "Or else become a leopard." It was a story he thought of often, these days.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> An old popslash sketch, originally posted to my LJ in Feb. 2004.


End file.
